OmNet: A Homestead Network Where Code Decides

OmNet is the network that watches my homestead in north-central Pennsylvania: weather, frost, the chicken coop, cameras, power and the network itself. Since September 2026 it has run on one low-cost single-board computer I call Core. Its founding rule is that nothing running around the clock calls an AI model. The routine work is done by 24 sentinels in one compiled Rust program. In late October I bent that rule on purpose. Core writes about 19,500 journal lines and 1,250 broker messages a day, and no fixed pattern list covers them. A new service, logwall, reduces each line to a shape and asks a hosted model about a shape only the first time it appears. Code, not the model, decides what becomes an alert. It has run in shadow mode for days, not months, so I have no false alert rate yet. Field Notes technical report. Web edition: https://charles-forsyth.github.io/papers/2026-10-29-omnet-a-homestead-network-where-code-decides.html. This record holds the PDF (ACM sigconf, PDF/A-2b) and the LaTeX source.